


Negative Space

by what_alchemy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Future Fic, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 03:57:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17994395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: The past washes over her more these days than it ever did before.





	Negative Space

It’s been more than thirty years but by God, Petunia knows him when she sees him. The sharp slant of his shoulders. The profile like a hatchet. The particular angle of his thin-lipped sneer. Normal person clothes and a haircut cannot hide him—not from her.

She stops right there before the muesli, her hands spastic on the trolley. In front of her, Severus Snape inspects the Tesco-brand oatmeal as if it has personally offended him. She can pinpoint the exact moment he realises he’s being watched; he goes absolutely still and a muscle ticks in his jaw.

“They told me you were dead,” she says, because there’s no one else in the aisle, and God only knows what a freak like him will do to her if he believes himself threatened.

He straightens, his back to her, and places the steel-cut oats back on the shelf. He tilts his body just far enough her way to make the appearance of looking at her.

“Madam, I do believe you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Excuse me.” He makes to slither away, but Petunia is possessed by something hot and furious she cannot name, and she blocks him with her trolley. Finally he faces her, and she wishes there were rage in his face, or shock, or anything but the cool pairing of sneer and raised brow.

“They told me you were _dead_.”

Beetle-black eyes glitter dangerously even as he narrows them at her.

“Are you well, madam?” he says, old mockery around the edges of it. “Is there someone I should call for you? A nephew, perhaps?”

Petunia can sneer with the best of them.

“He’s not like us, Severus,” she said.

“What?” Snape snorts. “Bitter? Old? Pathetic?”

She doesn’t know what it is, really, that urges her forward. Curiosity. An old jealousy that’s dulled to an ache she’s learned to live with. All the empty spaces she’s sure people can see when they look at her.

“He doesn’t have to live with her memory,” she says. “Not really.”

 

 

 

Dudley had put her up at a beachside bed and breakfast, of all places.

“Do you some good,” he’d said, gruff and earnest. “Get out of the house. Relax. Have someone wait on you a bit for once.”

Her son had probably not meant for her to bring a strange man to her room first chance she got. And he is a _very_ strange man. He stares out at the way the water laps at the shore. He doesn’t touch his tea.

“Why Wales?” he says.

“You know,” she says, waving a hand in the opposite direction of the bay. “All those old mining towns.” Perhaps the corner of his twisted mouth twitches; perhaps it’s what’s left of her imagination. “Your turn,” she says.

“I’d never been.”

Petunia nods. She watches the gulls swoop and dive. Come too close to people. Their piercing cries used to bother her, but she has learned to tune them out.

“Who told you?” he says after the sun’s tracked longer shadows across the sand.

“No one _told me_ anything,” she says. “We may as well be subhuman to you lot; why would any of you tell us anything?”

She can practically _feel_ the way he rolls his eyes. She huffs and turns her face completely away from him. A little boy slathered with white lotion is running into the water and running back out again, squealing, begging his mother to look at him. She reads a book and shouts out unenthusiastic praise without looking up.

“I overheard them when they were putting all our things to rights after…after. _Can’t believe it about Snape, _they said. _Did you hear what Potter’s saying about him?_ they said. _That dirty great snake,_ they said. _Can’t tell if I’m sad or relieved _, they said.” Petunia sniffs. “What other miserable bastard could they be talking about?”____

____“Your mother’d box your ears if she heard you call me that,” Snape snaps, a half-forgotten northerly lilt colouring his tone._ _ _ _

____“My mother—” Petunia chokes off her own words. She breathes in deep—sea air fills her up, warm and easy. Her mother had been too soft on Lily, on Severus, on every hard luck case that ever came her way. Half-dead plants and three-legged strays and unwashed, pinch-faced boys with shoes three sizes too small—her mother couldn’t resist. Her mother never knew the value of leaving the less fortunate to their lot in life. Her mother didn’t know what it would cost her in the end. “My mother is dead,” Petunia says._ _ _ _

____“It’s going around,” Snape says lightly. Out of the corner of her eye, Petunia sees him fish a sugar cube out of the dish and set it in a spoonful of cold builder’s. She gazes unwaveringly into the bay. He’ll suck the tea through the sugar cube, and then add more tea until that’s gone too. He’ll do that until the sugar is gone, and then he’ll start over. He used to sit in their kitchen sucking away at sugar cubes while Lily jabbered and their mother silently, happily, added more and more sugar to the dish. Petunia once teased him about it mercilessly, and her mother _had_ boxed her ears, but she never saw him do it again. She still won’t; the sounds alone are obscene enough. _He’s enjoying torturing me with it_ , she thinks. _ _ _ _

____“She went to Lily’s wedding,” Petunia says. “It was so beautiful, she told me. All manner of…magical things, floating about.”_ _ _ _

____“You are many things, Tuney, but Slytherin isn’t one of them.”_ _ _ _

____“What’s that supposed to mean?” It sounds _filthy_ , and she scowls at him._ _ _ _

____“You’re not clever enough to bother me,” he says. “You never have been.”_ _ _ _

____“Potter was though,” she says, and smiles with all her teeth. He pointedly does not look at her. “Or was it that he wasn’t clever, hmm? It _irritated you_ , didn’t it Severus, that she could be so dazzled by someone football-mad and dull as sea glass? A brilliant w-witch like her? It was a _waste!_ ”_ _ _ _

____The spoon drops into his mug with a splatter, sugar cube and all._ _ _ _

____“You should have been at her wedding yourself,” he says. “She would have invited you, I know it. She would have wanted you there—would have been naive, no, bloody _fool_ enough to want to show you off. Her plain, talentless Muggle of an elder sister, can you imagine?” He throws back the builder’s as if it’s a pint and sneers again when it’s swallowed away. “Christ but she was…”_ _ _ _

____Beautiful? Perfect? Infuriating? What adjective would Snape choose, and how badly would it roil Petunia’s gut? Yes, she had been invited to the wedding. No, she hadn’t gone. How could she have? She might as well make merry with Martians._ _ _ _

____“…young,” he finally says._ _ _ _

____Together, they watch the tide._ _ _ _

 

 

 

The past washes over her more these days than it ever did before. She is helpless against it when she invites Severus to stay the night despite their failure to exchange a civil word. She’s got the duvet pulled up to her chin, while Severus lies still as a corpse atop it.

“My husband is dead,” she says.

“I know,” Severus says.

“How?”

“Obvious,” he says.

“It was a heart attack.”

“Of course.”

“Why are you like this?”

“Why are _you_ like this?”

“You don’t know what it’s like.” Petunia says. “You know _nothing_ , Severus Snape.”

“You’re tragic, you are,” Severus says, and she can hear that horrid grey smokestack town in his voice again. “Poor Tuney, asked to take her dead sister’s baby. Poor Tuney, she had to think of someone other than herself _one! bloody! time!_ ”

“I held her when she was born,” Petunia says, and she hears Severus’s teeth click shut. “Before my gran, before my aunts. I held her, and I smelled her lovely head, and I looked into her eyes and she looked right back. She looked right back.”

Severus’s breath is not laboured. Petunia knows he’s there only by the way the duvet traps her, pinned beneath his weight.

“She’s been dead longer than she’d been alive,” Severus says after they should both be asleep.

“Yes,” Petunia says. “So what does that make you?”

“A relic,” Severus says, “with nothing and no one.”

“Tragic.”

“At least I don’t invite men I hate into my bed just to feel less alone.”

“Yes, because embracing the solitude has been so good for your temperament.”

“Who are you, Tuney?” Severus says. “Who are you with no husband, and a son grown up and too ashamed of you to have you near him, no nephew to kick about and blame for all your ills? _Who—are—you?_ ”

It’s funny—Severus hasn’t lied to her once today. Characteristically blunt and cruel, in his assessment both of her and of himself. He’s rather brave, in a slimy, freakish way. She cannot even pretend to match him in it. But she knows that for all his bluster, he is the one who could be anywhere at any moment, and he chooses to be here, with her, soaking up all the bile of their history.

Earlier this evening, she watched the sea lift driftwood off the shore and swallow it up.

 

 

 

“What would you change?” Petunia says into the dark.

Severus is silent for so long she wonders if he’s dead after all, and she’s been talking to a ghost. Lily said there were ghosts at that freak school. Said it as if it weren’t preposterous and terrifying. Said it as if they were her friends. And then:

“I never would have told him about the prophecy.”

Petunia doesn’t know what that means, but it feels heavy in the silence between them. She breathes, but her lungs are shallow tonight.

“I would have picked him up when he cried,” she says.

Severus shifts onto his side, and when Petunia looks over, she is confronted with a back, broader than she would have imagined, clad in black. He is negative space, and she is blinder when she faces him than when she closes her eyes.

 

**End**


End file.
